Post navigation

Futuribles: Seeking the Levers of History by Focusing on the Types of Individuals In Societies to be Governed

Please try not to get whiplash as we move back and forth through the decades. Just this week the OECD conceded openly that instead of focusing on structures and incentives, which both traditional government approaches and New Public Management theory (arose in the 1980s and 90s and tied to what is also called the Third Way) “are prone to do, it is more important and fruitful to focus on the type of individuals, particularly their competences and skills, which are populating these governance structures.” Explains so much, doesn’t it? That’s why education now targets what the Paris-based Futuribles initiative funded by the Ford Foundation in the early 60s called the ‘inner self’.

http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2016/04/governing-complex-education-systems.html is the truly stunning confessional document on ‘steering’ people and places to fit with desired theories of change in the “socials sciences, it [complexity theory, which the OECD itself states is akin to the Dynamic Systems Theory fiction we met in the last post] offers a metaphor, or a lens, through which we might better understand what it takes to initiate and sustain systemic change.” All of our recent encounters with various members of the Atlas Network and their frequent teaming now with either the Brookings Institute or Center for American Progress makes much more sense when we recognize that the official OECD position on how to achieve “socio-historical change in human society” is through “policy making” and changes in consciousness.

This is also why it matters so much that, unbeknownst to us, the behavioral sciences have been thoroughly embedded in education ‘reforms.’ They now define students as ‘goal-seeking systems’ as Boulding laid it out. Competency-based education and ‘evidence-based policy in education’ are simply the newest obscuring euphemisms for what the Futuribles contemplated as the way to use education to ensure that the “social sciences should orient themselves toward the future.” Futuribles wanted “to instigate or stimulate efforts of social and especially political forecasting.” It would be based on using the human imagination, unrestrained by fact-based moorings to the present or the past, to speculate on different futures and then to motivate personal action to make it so.

Quoting Destutt de Tracy who was declared to have “said very well: ‘It is the constant march of the human mind. First it acts, then it reflects on what is has done, and by so doing learns to do it still better.'” That’s the theory of education being espoused now when we hear a Principal or Super declare that a school or district no longer embraces a ‘deficit view of the child.’ For any readers who are unaware, the same Ford Foundation funding the Futuribles research organization and the translation of The Art of Conjecture into English in 1967 also financed the creation of our often-encountered Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in the 50s. That would also be the place where Kenneth Boulding and others created systems theory.

A chapter of that book is called “The Project” and seeks to use mental images “that do not represent any reality past or present” to become a person’s goals for acting in the future. Here is the vision for the Project (italics in original).

“There is no volition without object, and the object of a volition is that a fiction of the mind become a ‘fact’. This fact is the goal of action (in the sense of ‘action’ defined below). When we retain a fiction as something to be enacted, it serves as the source of systematic action. This fiction–a non-fact–can be situated only in the future, which is necessary as a receptacle for a fiction accompanied by an injunction to become real.”

I am going to stop for a moment to come back to the present. Just this week I got an announcement from a company called ProExam of a new product called Tessera that could be used by schools to assess non-cognitive attributes and qualities of students using what it called Forced Choice and Situational Judgment scenarios. It also reminded educators that these social and emotional learning attributes were now a statutory mandate for measuring and monitoring under federal law. Now we can go back to what was laid out in 1967 in the intro to the next chapter called ‘The Conditional’:

“I have formed a representation that does not correspond to observable reality and placed it in a domain suited to receive it; now my activity tends toward validation of what my imagination has constructed. [Anyone tying this aim then to the rise of Project-Based Learning and the Maker Movement now?] For the event to comply with my design, the moral force of my intention must hold and push me on the road to the goal. But the road must really lead to the goal; and this implies that the appropriate road has been discerned (an intellectual operation). Hobbes put it all like this: ‘For the thoughts are to the desires as scouts, and spies to range abroad, and find the way to the things desired.'”

The goal then is “like a beacon beckoning me.” Those of you who have read my book know how much research I laid out showing that the real Common Core implementation targets ‘values, attitudes, and beliefs’ as a means to change behavior in the future. On top of those disclosures, let’s now overlay this Futuribles recognition from that same chapter:

“Any power, whether social or political, is maintained by people’s attitudes; any project, short or long, shallow or profound, is founded on their attitudes and behavior. Now each of us is capable of changing his attitude and behavior…Concerning the individuals of a society, we cannot doubt that they have received a code of behavior from their family and from society, that they are subject to pressure from their fellow men, and that they are pushed into particular roles.

But we also know that they are able to form and pursue projects. And each project is the germ of a shoot which may or may not be propitious for the maintenance of the general form of the society. Lesage once made use of a Lame Demon who unroofed houses to reveal what was going on inside. Let us suppose that this diable boiteux could reveal people’s minds in the same way, enabling us to surprise the projects each member of society forms in his inner self.

We could then apprehend, at their origin, those shoots which as they grow will deform the familiar social surface and produce swellings, fractures, and cracks. What will these changes be? How can they be foreseen? Here lies the subject that preoccupies us.”

And I would add that this is the subject that has preoccupied all so-called K-12 education reforms globally from the 60s forward under a variety of names. It absolutely is the lodestar of what is mandated under ESSA and what practices are required to merit federal funding and expansion of charter schools. It also is what drives the social and economic steering visions laid out in that graphic OECD report that is part of its New Approaches to Economic Challenges(NAEC) initiative. Given that the acknowledged target of all these education reforms is the inner self, which is why I bolded it, we should read carefully that a key component to “building the systemic capacity of the government to improve policy design, steering, and implementation” is Trust.

I am sure that it is entirely coincidental that the same theme of Trust was a major component of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s recent speech on public policy. As the OECD laid out as the requisite means for Governing Complex Systems that includes people and their inner selves (their competences and skills, remember?), “the public’s trust in government must be reenforced, and efforts must be made to strengthen institutions and build capacity across different dimensions of trust (e.g. reliability, fairness and impartiality, integrity and honesty, and inclusiveness).”

That VA Scandal and the lack of actual consequences is just so darn inconvenient to this trust demand, isn’t it? All of our encounters with think tanks and what I call the Faux Common Core narrative, as well as deceit surrounding the nature of federalism and the Constitutional Convention calls, makes much more sense when we throw in this quote:

“Which outcome is realised in the social sciences is a question of intervention at as many levels as possible: for example, at the macro-structural level [WIOA] and at the intentional human agency level [ESSA], so that sufficient momentum is generated in a particular direction to displace the inertial momentum of the current dispensation and to create a dominant inertial momentum for the desired changes.”

Not the desired changes you or I might seek, but the changes desired by political and economic power to secure the futures they seek. DST from the last post, and complexity theory to the OECD oligarchs and their allies, is “first and last, about reaching critical mass among the diverse range of factors, elements and agents that constitute a particular environment.” In other words, complexity theory sounds more scientific that simply citing to the infamous Uncle Karl, but still allows political power to guide the so-called Scientific Management of Society he and the USSR dreamed of.

Instead of openly decreeing the institution of his Human Development Society that is also known as little ‘c’ communism to political theorists, we get the same ends approached through ‘complexity theory.’ We are all to still be the Governed with our inner selves measured and manipulated as “new properties and behaviors in the education system, emerges from the interaction of a myriad factors in the economic, political, social, and cultural environments in which education is situated.” Those would be the same environments currently targeted for steering via legislation that starts with Congress and the federal agencies and goes straight through to all of our local communities. All targeted for steering in the 21st Century.

If this sounds like we are to have sovereigns and be ruled, like it or not, the OECD paper actually used that word when it stated that “complex societies cannot be ruled rationally from one centre, if only because the amount of information that needs to be processed to make that possible far outstrips what any central government can achieve.” I guess that means that we are guided by oligarchs who believe there is nothing wrong with ruling per se. Governance is just a matter of finding better methods, starting again with that inner self.

Next time a think tank or politician hypes the ‘local’ or a private provider as the “Conservative’ position, remember that the OECD said that “privatisation and decentralization are not just about raising efficiency. They can be interpreted as ways in which national governments are moving power to places better able to handle the complexities of global, liquid, and interdependent societies.”

If governance in the 21st century and the Levers of History really have decreed the Inner Self as the key to sustainable change, it certainly does explain why there has been so much deceit surrounding what is really going on in education.

“We are creating the citizens who will be amenable to being governed” is certainly not why we send our kids to school and pay all the taxes that support this industry.

Frankly admitting that the true global aim after the Fall of the Berlin Wall was that “Power has moved away from central governments in different directions: upwards, toward international organizations, sideways to private institutions and non-governmental organizations, and downwards toward local governments and public enterprises such as schools and hospitals” would have each of us reexamining the load of deceit doled out by politicians of both parties over the last thirty years.

Mustn’t have us accurately reexamining the provided narrative of the past. History, after all, is now about imagining what the future could be and what must be done to act to achieve those goals.

The beauty of theorizing that we are all now just goal-setting systems and subject to manipulation by political power.

23 thoughts on “Futuribles: Seeking the Levers of History by Focusing on the Types of Individuals In Societies to be Governed”

Robin, am reminded of John Kasich’s interview that was run today in Politico Education where he proposed combining the departments of education and labor. Had always thought that would have been health and education, but he outlined the desirable combination to create a Competency-Based society.

This election becomes more important as the days go by. Right before our eyes the result of the dialectical process and the chaos and disillusionment it creates is unfolding. The “two steps forward and one step back” has suddenly become one giant step sideways.

CP-Kasich had already adopted a state version of what is laid out in WIOA before he was required to and Ohio is where KnowledgeWorks with its affinity for aligning with the Institute for the Future and its Project-oriented New Tech network of high schools and its Strive Together are all based. Strive Together allies itself with Lumina with its convening of 75 metro areas for the cradle to career vision. Plus Lumina (based just next door in Indiana) has the Diploma Qualifications Profile pushing a vision of higher ed with projects grounded in how the world might be different in the future. None of this is coincidental.

Ohio is also part of the Innovation lab Network with the role of creating the cutting-edge performance-based assessments. Before I left town for several days I had thoroughly nailed down the connection between what is now being called evidence-based policy per ESSA and performance-based assessments going back to the early 90s and ETS. Speaking of Inner Self, the aim is to specify precisely what the KSA-Knowledge, Skills, and desired Attributes of each person are to be.

Bertrand de Jouvenal and his Futuribles work were cited in the book the Alp story in the previous post was taken from. The book is History and Future: Using Historical Thinking to Imagine the Future and it laid out how prescribing the desired “categories and concepts and analogies” to create an ‘internally unified thought construction,” which is of course what the HOTS mandate in ESSA is looking for will then be used to “make sense of contemporary evidence and to give structure to a (future) reality.”

The OBE model was never about Behaviorism and Ford also financed Benjamin Bloom’s global work starting with that trip to India in 1957.

This election does matter. I am not sure there are any good candidates, but I know quite a few are fully on board with this vision and always have been.

“This fiction–a non-fact–can be situated only in the future, which is necessary as a receptacle for a fiction accompanied by an injunction to become real”

This is one of the most artfully crafted sentences of completely hubristic lying word witchery I have ever read in my life. And that is really saying something given all the odious ” in their own words” quotes that you, Robin, have unearthed for us over the past 5 years.

That line stood out to me as well, MC–and brought to mind Fadel and Trilling, who frequent global Ed conferences explaining why the past is irrelevant to 21st century learning. At one such conference, Trilling explained how educators must “toss out the rearview mirror” to teach students the skills needed to survive the future. This post illuminates precisely why. Even so I am genuinely baffled by how passively educators accept this ridiculously idiotic notion.

“The Art of Conjecture into English (Bertrand de Jouvenel) ..A chapter of that book is called “The Project” and seeks to use mental images “that do not represent any reality past or present” to become a person’s goals for acting in the future. Here is the vision for the Project (italics in original). There is no volition without object, and the object of a volition is that a fiction of the mind become a ‘fact’. This fact is the goal of action (in the sense of ‘action’ defined below). When we retain a fiction as something to be enacted, it serves as the source of systematic action. This fiction–a non-fact–can be situated only in the future, which is necessary as a receptacle for a fiction accompanied by an injunction to become real.”

I just wanted to store the book title and author in one place above, for future reference.

This reminds me of communism. The future is glorious. Any short term sacrifice to attain utopia on earth is worth it. The Russians quipped “The future is well known; it’s the past that keeps changing. ”

The last time I checked the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (The Standing Committee) consisted of one economist and the rest engineers by training. At least they are or were grounded in reality.

This should help. It is from the ending of The Project chapter. Remember standards are goals and planning and acting are what Competency and proficiency actually mean. Flyvberg told us that when he wrote about the role of the social sciences and the desire for an Arational Mind. I can put up that old post if someone would like. Here is Futuribles again:

“Knowing myself as a cause, I contemplate various effects: Situated where? In the future. We have already described this process of forming constructs placed in the future. If my efforts are sufficient [Achieve! Success!], I shall find my construct ‘standing’ tangible and actualized when the right time comes. But I cannot be certain of this. I am certain only of my design and my intention. I want to transform this certitude into a definite reality. I shall do everything in my power to make my particular design a certainty in fact. The verb certare means ‘to struggle’ and, in law, ‘to try to obtain a decision.’ What could be more revealing?

Thus, in the clearest of all languages, I can compose a sentence that sums everything up: Certo ut certum fiat in re quod certum in mente. The last certum denotes the well-defined character of the image on which my mind is quite decided; the previous certum denotes the result I seek–for things to be in fact like my image. But, to obtain this, an effort is required, a struggle denoted by certo.“

This sounds familiar. Thomas Sowell wrote the book :A Conflict of Visions.” He said in one vision intentions matter. In the other results matter. Liberals focus on what is ‘in their hearts’ and intentions. The ‘mean well.’ They conclude that conservatives intentions are evil and conservatives are bad people. Conservatives focus on results.

This is why talking to liberals is difficult. Conservatives talk about likely outcomes. Liberals can’t stand talking to such evil people and name call.

This is why i take my kids out of school for fun with me all the time and tell them what low intel most of their teachers are… Sounds mean but it works. They recognize when a teacher phones in sj drivel…they also recognize all the techniques and methods, while still gleaning some knowledge… And giving the dodo robots what they want.

http://www.learningandthebrain.com/ “Moving the Frontal Lobe to the Front of the Class.” If these people only knew how much this fits with what I have outlined on treating people and the mind as a system that can be redesigned via P-20 education.

“It also reminded educators that these social and emotional learning attributes were now a statutory mandate for measuring and monitoring under federal law”

That statement and this one show the two faced dysfunction of what this country has become.

“the public’s trust in government must be reenforced, and efforts must be made to strengthen institutions and build capacity across different dimensions of trust (e.g. reliability, fairness and impartiality, integrity and honesty, and inclusiveness).”

I say bugger off! There are still some people in this world who can seek through the web of deceit.
Found a yearbook online, only one copy. I’ll pass it along after I finish.

Just imagine the nonsensical mindset that types that creativity needs to be evenly distributed. Not if it’s genuine creativity instead of imagining alternative scenarios and then acting as a stakeholder to ask that political power make it so.

These jackwagons need to step off. Dont they know some pigs are more equal than other pigs? Seriously the waste of paper is mindboggling booklet after booklet of nonsence blather. You gotta get the book about Piaget by Webster Calloway i think is his name. He discovere the intentional nonsense in his writing, so fevered! He deconstructs the sentences. He discusses also his “Monads”…. Not the best written book but it explains several things that this crowd of liar/deceivers certainly learned from and constantly fill pages with.

Here is the list of the third way players in local stste and national govt positions. Check your beighbors and reps, note how many have risen to power. One of my neighbors is on it. Community organized since 1998 in my town. All the a21 and mdg’s efforts, zoning changes, beought HUD, brought BO to town, chamber of connerce gig, treasurer for lefty cobgressperson … Endless operator.

Third way conference at National Press Club CSPAN… OMG italian PM slip of the tongue has Clinton and Tony Blair giggling like school girls. About being socialist… Icarumba. All of the reams of paper with the rediculous nonsense and the opressive collectivism… Its for duh drumroll please… Well just lets let the world leaders tell us!